


Broken Windows

by SpicyReyes



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: (right at the beginning), Autistic Evan Hansen, BPD Connor Murphy, Discussions of Suicide, Gay Connor Murphy (Dear Evan Hansen), Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Problematic™ people, Slow Burn, Teen Angst, Temporary Character Death, based on the novel and not the play, time travel adjacent, universe jumping, which makes it Ultra Gay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-14 15:48:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16495643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpicyReyes/pseuds/SpicyReyes
Summary: Evan Hansen confessed his sins and then welcomed death.Instead, he woke up on the other side of a car crash looking in the eyes of Connor Murphy, in a world where all his lies are actually true.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> uhhh I read the novelization of DEH and it was Gay and so. here you go, me giving into the urge to write fic for this  
> It's not a Time Travel Fic™ like my usual garbage but it's. not far off
> 
> If you haven't read the novel version, here's a few important key details:  
> \- Connor is canonically queer (not explicitly labeled, but I chose for him to be gay here). He has an ex-boyfriend (also canon) who will come up in-text later in this fic  
> \- After admitting to his lies, Evan went out and sat in the street while a car was coming. In the novel canon, the ghost of Connor intervened, telling him to get up and keep going in the way he hadn't been able to. In this story, the car hits. 
> 
> Most other differences are minor changes to the wording of things or other tiny details, and I'll make sure to note them if they're relevant here in the notes at the start of the chapter they're referenced in. 
> 
> Other notes: I am autistic, and I have OCD and BPD on top of that, so uh...characters are gonna be hardcore projected on because of that. I like rubbing my nasty neurodivergent hands all over my favs. Someone might even get stuck with OCD just because I enjoy forcing explanations of how my hellbrain works into my writing as often as possible.  
> anyway, enjoy the tree gays

It seemed fitting, in a morbid way, that Evan would spend his teen years fearing cars and the risks they posed to his health, only to go willingly into the scenario he’d anxiously imagined himself on the other side of a million times.

Would the person who hit him be traumatized? Would they never drive again? Would they drink themselves to sleep at night and have nightmares of his face?

Would they even stop? Would they panic, press the gas, and speed away before the Murphys could even open their door?

And the Murphys. How would they feel, stepping into the light of day in the morning, ready to face a cruel world with knowledge of the harsh truths it bore, only to discover that yet another boy they’d put faith and love into had chosen to waste it by taking it straight into the grave?

In the last second before impact, he could swear that he could see Connor, illuminated in the headlights of the car. Reaching for him, hand out like his fantasy version of the boy, like he was alive and so was Evan and they were _friends,_ and nothing was a lie at all.

He got a single, brief glimpse of this, before he squeezed his eyes shut, and let it end.

  
  
  


He opened his eyes to see the sky, blue and bright and beautiful. A clear, open sky that went on forever, right out of his fantasy land.

Fitting, considering that Connor Murphy was looming over him as well, grimacing down at him.

Sensation slowly worked its way back to him. He was in pain, but he couldn’t place it, and most of his limbs were too numb to be its main source. He was lying on his back, and a twitch of his fingers registered the texture of grass.

“Ah, shit,” Connor swore, crouching at his side in this strange field. No, not a field - an _orchard._ He could see the trees in his peripherals, and confirmed them to bear apples when he craned his head to one side.

He also discovered that moving his head hurt horribly, which seemed a weird feature for an afterlife. Especially one that seemed so perfectly content to gift him the dream day he’d made up on the spot on the day that felt so far away now, yet still far too close.

“Where are we?” Evan managed to ask. His mouth felt like he had to pry it open, his tongue a lead weight in his mouth, and the words were tense and shaking as they left him.

“Oh, _fuck,”_ Connor cursed again, rather than answer. “That’s not good. Fuck, Evan- the orchard. Autumn Smile? Big, pretentious, full of repressed childhood memories?”

“Why is it _here_ ?” Evan asked. The words just tumbled out, a harsh contrast to the struggle the first three had been. “Why are _we_ here? Why are you...why did you come to get me?”

Connor had been reaching out, but he paused at that, hand hovering in the air. Evan wasn’t sure what he’d been planning to do, but he doubted he would have the chance to find out.

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” Connor declared. “And then you are never, ever, _ever_ climbing another fucking tree in your life. I mean it, Hansen.”

Connor’s voice was just as shaky as Evan’s, if not somehow _more_ so.

Evan raised his eyes back to the sky. He was confused, and in pain, and he wasn’t sure what sort of reaction he was _meant_ to have to this weird purgatory he’d found himself in.

“Hospital?” he echoed. “What are you talking about?”

“You _fell,”_ Connor told him, the words almost nonsensical to Evan. “Out of a big ass tree. Dammit, dammit, dammit...Why did you fucking climb up with me? That was stupid. I do stupid shit, you’re supposed to be the smart one, what the _fuck?”_

“I don’t understand,” Evan said.

“Yeah,” Connor replied. “I guess not. You hit your head pretty fuckin’ hard, and I need to take you to the hospital and make sure you’re not, I dunno, bleeding internally or some shit.”

Connor was swearing an awful lot, and his voice was steadily climbing in pitch. Evan would think him panicked, if that weren’t a completely ridiculous concept. Then again, nothing was really making sense, here: why was he smack in the center of a fairytale version of his life? Why was his make-believe friendship the world that the universe had decided to greet him with after death?

“Connor,” Evan said, voice soft and quiet and heavy with guilt. “I’m sorry.”

“You- what? Shut the fuck up, Evan,” Connor demanded, and then his arm was dipping beneath his shoulder, scooping him off the ground. Evan buckled the moment he attempted to put weight on his legs, and so Connor shifted immediately, swinging his other arm beneath Evan’s knees in a princess carry that probably would have been embarrassing if they weren’t in…

Well, wherever they were. It seemed too bright to be Hell, but he couldn’t imagine himself anywhere else.

“Ugh,” Connor grunted. “I don’t think I can carry you like this.”

“We shouldn’t have any problems,” Evan mused aloud. “Our bodies should be totally fine. They shouldn’t even _exist.”_

“...Yeah,” Connor drawled, voice distant. “You’re definitely concussed.”

“I got hit by a car.”

“No,” Connor said, with a tense tone like he was correcting a child. “You fell out of a tree.”

“No, I mean, after that,” Evan said. “That's how I died.”

“Alright, now you're really freaking me out, Evan,” Connor told him. “I'm gonna put you down, and I need you to walk, okay?”

Things were slowly starting to make even _less_ sense, and so Evan stopped arguing for a moment, instead trying to take inventory of his body and his surroundings to try and figure out what he _could_ be certain of, rather than all the questions that kept popping up.

Certainty #1: He was in an orchard.

Certainty #2: Connor Murphy was somehow with him.

Everything else was just guesswork. Judging by the sharp pain slowly creeping through the numbness, his arm was broken again, but the state of the rest of his body was up in the air. Whatever weird realm of existence his afterlife was in, it was mirroring the lies he’d told exactly.

Maybe it wasn’t even an afterlife. Maybe he was in a coma, dreaming this up, and he’d wake to find that he still had all the hell of his life to deal with, plus whatever long term damage came from sitting down in the road and waiting for the car to finish you off.

He _really_ hoped that wasn’t true. The idea of facing his mistakes made the anxiety rolling in his gut a thousand times worse, the water rushing past his ears as the tides rolled in to drown him. His breathing came fast, and the reaction made him panic more, because why would an afterlife keep the feeling of a risk of death?

“Whoa,” Connor rushed out, quickly shifting Evan’s weight from trying to drop his feet back on the ground to lowering him to the grass completely, letting him curl in on himself. “Breathe, Evan. Maybe...Maybe I shouldn’t take you to the hospital myself, maybe I should call an ambulance. I don’t want to make you worse. That’s a thing, right? You’re not supposed to move people who are really injured?”

“Spinal injuries,” Evan managed. “That’s spine injuries. You could paralyze them.”

“Well, shit,” Connor said. “I probably shouldn’t have picked you up before I knew if you had one of those, huh?”

“Probably not.”

Connor let out a long, deep sigh. “Man, I just keep fucking this up, don’t I? I’m gonna call an ambulance.”

“Those are expensive.”

Connor winced, and Evan immediately hated himself for even opening his mouth. Whether this was a dream or an afterlife, money wasn’t a feature in it. Why even say anything?

“So...what should I do?” Connor asked. “What do you want me to do?”

If his misspeak did anything positive, it was distract him - the water was gone, and he could force a deep breath, even if he did so through a heavy chest and a potent self-hatred. “Why do we have to leave?” he asked, quietly. “Why can’t we stay here?”

“Evan, a minute ago you were convinced you walked into traffic or something,” Connor reminded him. “You should probably make sure you’re not- that you’re okay. Make sure you didn’t hit your head too hard.”

They were both quiet for a moment, sitting in the grass.

“...I don’t want to leave, either,” Connor admitted, quietly. “This was fun. Until I fucked it up, anyway.”

“You didn’t fuck it up,” Evan said. “I...I don’t know what’s going on, but it isn’t your fault.”

“See, _that’s_ why you need a hospital,” Connor said, sounding frustrated. “Just how scrambled is your brain, right now? What did we do before we got here?”

Evan had his lie memorized, to the tiniest detail. It had been a matter of survival. “...Ice cream at A La Mode?”

Connor’s shoulders relaxed the tiniest bit. “Before that?” he asked.

Evan had never made up a beginning to their adventure. Their story never really had a starting point, no origin for their friendship to stem from, no place where they first started talking.

“Evan?” Connor prompted.

“I don’t know,” Evan answered. “I...I just...I don’t _know_.”

Connor shot up to his feet. “I’m driving you to the hospital,” he insisted. “No ambulance, but you _have_ to see a doctor.”

Evan wasn’t sure what was going on, where they were, what they were doing. He didn’t know how he got from a street in front of the Murphy house to the middle of an orchard with a dead boy, and why said dead boy seemed completely oblivious to the fact that _he was dead._

He did know, though, that his body ached, and if this dream felt like being so realistic, it could at least pop in some morphine.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Okay, let’s go.”

  
  
  


The radio played about three notes of a cheery, old-timey sounding song before Connor slammed a finger down against the button, shutting it off completely. They rode in total silence, Connor paying absolutely zero attention to basic driving safety.

They were in Zoe’s car, and Evan wondered if this dream/ghost world bothered to give a reason why he was able to get away with taking it. He could have asked Connor, but every time he glanced over to the driver’s seat, the tense lines of Connor’s face made it hard to find words. He was stressing out something awful, and Evan didn’t want to poke the hornet’s nest of his temper if he could avoid it.

 _Not_ saying anything, though, felt almost worse, the tense air between them feeling like it was strangling him. He had nothing to say, no conversation starters prepared, no relevant topics he knew they could converse over. Nothing safe, nothing tested, nothing worth opening his mouth over.

The car was the only thing he could think to talk about, and Zoe seemed like a topic that served as a field of active landmines for Connor.

He said nothing.

“Okay, fuck this,” Connor suddenly announced. “Talk to me. Say something. Literally anything, I'm going crazy just sitting here.”

“You could turn the radio back on?” Evan suggested.

“No, I could _not._ I don't want shitty top 40 hits or anything like that, I want _you_ to _talk_.”

Well, that was as good an invitation as he was going to get. “Why are you driving Zoe's car?”

Connor shot him a look out, face pulling taut again before he looked back out onto the road. “She's at some jazz band performance thing, but our loving and adoring parents went with her, so they all shared a car.”

“And you…?”

Connor raised one hand off the wheel, and it took Evan a second to realize what he was trying to show: the back of his hand was red and had small patches of split skin and blistering.

“I punched through the wall last night,” he told Evan, with the casual tone one would talk about watching a television program or doing homework. “I'm under house arrest.”

Evan's heart shot into his throat. “Like...with the police?”

Connor snorted. “No. Not with the _police._ With Larry.”

Connor called his dad by his first name? Yikes. That was like...classic rebellious teen move, and way too openly disrespectful for Evan, who would probably apologize to a serial killer for taking too long to be murdered. Hell, he'd been preemptively apologizing to that car for the inconvenience that hitting him would be.

“So they think you’re at home?” Evan asked.

“Probably not,” Connor said. “I mean, fuck knows what they _think_ I’m doing, but chances are they don’t honestly think I’m just hanging out at the house. Unless they’re banking on me being asleep. Jokes on them, I’ve been binging on energy drinks and loud music for at least 48 hours now.”

“That’s..really not healthy,” Evan replied weakly. Immediately, he felt ridiculous - here he was, in whatever strange hallucination this was, telling _Connor Murphy_ that his habits weren’t healthy. As though the guy gave two shits about his health. Even without his suicide being taken into consideration, he’d been on drugs since they were old enough to learn what pot _was_ and had been doing everything else destructive under the sun before then.

“Yeah, well,” Connor said, waving his raised hand dismissively before setting it back on the wheel. “That’s half the reason I called you about coming out here. Something about dragging my ass back to this shithole seemed like a good idea 36 hours deep.”

When he told this story, Evan hadn’t really thought about what led to the decision to come out there. Knowing now about the orchard, the idea that Connor thought of it and immediately wanted to show it to him was touching.

Even if he wasn’t really sure what was going on.

“I liked it,” he told Connor. “It was an amazing day.”

“I’m driving you to the hospital, Evan.”

“Yeah, but-...” Evan looked out the windshield. “That’s the best thing, actually.”

He could feel Connor squinting at him.

“Please watch the road,” he squeaked out, as the car started to pull slightly to the right.

Connor rolled his eyes but complied, correcting his driving and giving a shorter, momentary glance to prompt Evan to speak again.

“I fell out of a tree,” Evan said. “And...you came. When I was lying on the ground, you came and got me. You worried about me. You’re taking me to make sure I’m okay. I’m not alone.”

The silence returned, this one more awkward than anything. Evan desperately waited for Connor to speak.

When he did respond, it was a bewildered sounding laugh. “That...that is the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

The familiar words made it hard for Evan to even fake a laugh in response, but he forced one out.

“If you need proof I’m not gonna just abandon you,” Connor said, “just suggest we watch a shitty movie or something. Don’t fall out of a tree and bust your ass.”

Evan shook his head, a small smile tugging at his lips. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  
  
  
  


The visit to the ER wasn’t that much different from the real one, for the most part. Connor hung back, hands in his pockets, looking cagey and uncomfortable, and talked to no one. The only exception to this was when the doctor asked about his pains and problems, and Evan tried to give a similar answer to the first time, at which point Connor cut in and aggressively corrected that Evan had been babbling and had forgotten most of their day.

The doctor had seemed a little alarmed, and Evan got the joy of spending hours getting various tests and scans performed to try and make sure he wasn’t dying.

The verdict was that if he _had_ hurt his brain, it had been a temporary jostle, and he appeared to be fine. He was given instructions to check in with a doctor if his memory issues or confusion persisted more than a day or two, or if anything got worse, and sent on his merry way.

Back in the car, Evan eyed Connor, who looked a lot stiffer now as he drove toward Evan’s house.

“You don’t like hospitals,” he observed - quietly, tentatively.

“Rehab vibes,” Connor offered as explanation. “I’m not really a huge fan of doctors.”

Evan didn’t no how to respond to that, so he just nodded, locking his eyes out the window to the road and resigning himself to the quiet.

Connor, apparently deciding that wasn’t acceptable anymore, reached out to click the radio back on. He fished his phone out of his pocket, next, fiddling with it for a second, before the radio announced a cheery “CONNECTED” and music started to play. The song from earlier started up again, the radio display labelling it “Wonderful World” by Sam Cooke.

It wasn’t the song he immediately thought of, with the name, but a happy sounding song about loving someone and not being terribly great at academics.

Curiosity drove Evan to look down, to where Connor was setting his phone aside, In the split second before he hit the button on the side to shut his screen off, Evan managed to get a glimpse of the playlist he’d put on.

The title was “ROADTRIP WITH EH.”

A series of upbeat songs carried them back to Evan’s house, but the source of the happy feeling bubbling in Evan’s chest was solely driven by the idea that in whatever universe this was, Connor not only hung out with him, but had a whole playlist dedicated to doing so.

He didn’t know how long he’d be here, or what the catch was, but for now...for now, he was happy to be a part of it.

He only hoped that when the other shoe dropped, it wasn’t enough to crush him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why "wonderful world"?  
> "Now I don't claim to be an A student/but I'm trying to be/'cause maybe by being an A student, baby/I can win your love for me"


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tree bros + their respective families for this one!   
> also you guys were so nice about the first chapter ;u; danke

“Don’t fall asleep.”

Evan almost laughed. As it was, he just shook his head, and replied, “I’m pretty sure I’m not concussed, but I won’t.”

Connor nodded once, hesitating in the doorway for a moment before taking a step back. “You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Evan assured him. “My mom will be home soon, anyway, and she’s a nurse. I’m not-...Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

Connor’s shoulders slacked a little, and he nodded again. “Good.”

They stared at each other for a bit.

“...I should go,” Connor said. “Before the wardens get back. I mean, I doubt they’ll believe I didn’t leave the house, but I can try.”

“You should sleep,” Evan suggested. At Connor’s raised eyebrow, he panicked, backpedaling quickly. “Or not! You just- you said you’d been awake for a really long time, and that’s not good for you, and you mentioned energy drinks and those  _ really  _ aren’t good for you, so you should-...”

“I got it,” Connor cut in, sounding like he was trying not to laugh. “If you promise  _ not  _ to sleep, I promise to try to sleep.”

“I already said-...”

Connor squinted at him.

“...I won’t sleep,” Evan acquiesced. “At least until my mom is home to make sure I’m fine. Okay?”

“Good.” Connor took another step back, leaning back on his heels on Evan’s front step. “I should-...”

“Yeah,” Evan agreed. “Go home, get some sleep.”

Connor nodded again, long hair swishing against his shoulders. 

Feeling like he should say something, Evan added, “I had fun today.”

“You broke your arm.”

Evan just shrugged in response, which made Connor laugh.

“I’m going,” he announced, turning to head back to Zoe’s car. “See you later, Evan.”

“See you later.”

Connor got into the car, and Evan watched him pull out of the driveway and out onto the street before he shut the front door, collapsing against it.

“What is happening?” he asked the empty air of his house. 

Silence was his only answer.

  
  
  
  


“Evan? I’m home!”

Evan froze in mid-scroll, the stream of social media posts he’d turned to in the hopes of making sense of things stopping to make way for the panic of the realization that  _ his mom was home.  _

The last time he’d seen his mom, things had gotten ugly. There was so much anger and bitterness and resentment, and he’d said things he really wished he hadn’t and other things that he sort of wanted to say again. 

The dream world hadn’t cracked yet, and Heidi’s voice was that forced happy tone it always was when she was exhausted but didn’t want to risk pushing Evan away if he wanted to talk. No Murphys here, feeding him and caring for him and offering to pay for his college. Or, well, they were there, they just weren’t  _ his  _ family. 

They were Connor’s, and Connor didn’t even  _ like  _ them.

Evan shut his laptop just as his door opened, and he turned to face his mom’s tired smile. “Hey, mom.”

“Hey, honey,” she replied. “What’d you-...what happened to your arm?!”

Evan raised his cast up slightly, looking down at it. “I, uh. I fell out of a tree.”

“Oh, Evan,” she sighed. “I didn’t even know you worked today, or I would have driven you before I left. I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”

Evan shook his head. “Not really.” 

What was more of an issue than pain was the constant jarring sight of stark white that kept flashing in the corner of his vision. He’d gotten used to his cast at one point, but without Connor’s name in big black letters, it was foreign all over again. 

At least the plaster would keep him from squeezing his arm, which was an annoying nervous tic he’d picked up after the cast was removed. Maybe he’d been trying to simulate the squeeze of the material, pretending Connor’s brand was still there to lend credibility to his constantly growing pile of bullshit, or maybe it wasn’t anywhere near that deep - the reason was less important than the fact that it had been a thing at all. 

That did bring up an important thought, though. Would Connor sign his name again? Would a world where they had really been friends lead to a real, genuine exchange, like their one in the computer lab? 

And, if it did...would Connor still kill himself?

A horrible thought occured to Evan, then: what if his afterlife, his personally crafted version of Hell, was a world where he actually  _ had  _ been friends with Connor, had been everything he pretended to be, and it didn’t change anything at all? A world where someone actually  _ liked  _ him, even just a little, but he wasn’t enough to keep anyone around.

What if he was in a world where instead of the self-righteous feeling of  _ I’m helping them  _ that Evan had justified his actions with, he lived instead with the guilt that he’d had the power to stop it and didn’t. 

“...Mom,” Evan said, slowly, a half-baked plan forming from a manic idea in his mind. “How many days left until school starts?”

“Uh,” Heidi faltered, eyes raising to the ceiling as she visibly worked through the mental math. “Eight? It’s next Monday, right?”

“Right,” Evan confirmed, even though he had no idea what the actual timeline of this place was. 

“Why? You’re not stressing out about it, are you? I promise you’ll be fine.”

“No, I know,” Evan dismissed. “It’s not that. I, um…”

“Yeah…?” Heidi prompted. 

Eight days. If this  _ was  _ a dream in a coma, he had nothing to lose. If it was some kind of purgatory, he had no time to waste. 

If there was any,  _ any  _ chance that he could affect things, that he could make this make-believe land turn out better than the real one, shouldn’t he try his best?

Regardless of what happened to him, of how it affected his real life...shouldn’t he save Connor Murphy?

“Mom,” Evan said. “I need to tell you something.”

Heidi’s eyebrows knit together in concern. “Yeah? What is it, sweetie? Talk to me.”

Evan searched for words - for the lies that had started to come so easily to him toward the end, that he was now unsure were even false. “I have...I have a friend, okay?”

Heidi looked beyond confused. “A friend?”

“Yeah,” Evan confirmed. “We’ve been friends for a while but we don’t really ever...talk about it. Just...email, y’know, that kind of thing.”

“You have a secret email friend?”

Evan winced. “Yeah, I know, it sounds stupid, but...I didn’t work today. I was hanging out with him.”

“I see,” Heidi said. “So, what’s his name? Your secret email buddy?”

She didn’t believe him. Not surprising, really, because he sounded a little bit crazy the way he was throwing it out. 

“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” Evan said. “He doesn’t...He doesn’t really like me to talk about us being friends?”

Heidi squinted. “You have a friend that doesn’t admit to being your friend? Sounds like a jerk, to me.”

Evan shook his head. “No, no...I mean, I don’t blame him. I’m kind of a loser.” Before Heidi could argue, he raised his hands, backpedaling. “But! It’s not like you talk to anybody anyways, so you shouldn’t ever get it back to his parents or anybody at school or anything, so...his name’s Connor.”

“‘Connor,’ huh?” Heidi tipped her head. “And Connor was with you when you broke your arm?”

“He drove me to the hospital,” Evan confirmed. “He was really worried about me. It was kind of...nice, y’know? That he cared that much.”

“Sweetheart,” Heidi said, slowly. “What’s the catch you’re getting at, here? You’re not telling me this just for full disclosure.”

Evan pursed his lips. “I…” He picked at a loose string on his t-shirt, took a deep breath, and told himself,  _ no going back.  _ “I don’t think he’s okay.”

“No?”

“I think-...Well, I mean-...,” Evan started, then stopped, then tried again. “I think he needs help, but I don’t know how to get it for him. I don’t know how to make things better for him when I don’t even really know how to take care of myself.”

“Oh, honey,” Heidi sighed, crossing the room to sit on the edge of his bed. “Evan, if your friend is struggling, sometimes all you can do is be there for them. There’s not always something you  _ can  _ do. There are no easy answers to stuff like this. Hell, if there were, I’d have found them by now. As it is, I’m just making this up as I go.”

Evan laughed softly in response. “I don’t think either of us is in a good place,” he said. “I...I think pretty much everything in therapy is crap, so I don’t really listen to it, and Connor…”

The smell of weed clinging to a worn out hoodie, an arm covered in various cheap plastic and rubber bracelets that likely concealed a number of scars, bruises and scratches on knuckles where he’d punched through a wall…

“Connor’s a disaster,” Evan said, and felt bad for how true it rang out. “And everyone who tries to help does it wrong and just makes it worse, and I don’t know how to not be one of them. I don’t know how to make it better.”

“Evan,” Heidi said. “If your situations were reversed, what would you want someone to do for you?”

That wasn’t a hard question to answer. “Just be my friend, I guess?”

“Well,” she said, “there you go. Be his friend.”

Evan thought of Connor’s panicked eyes searching him for injury as he sat sprawled out on the grass of the orchard, and nodded, more to himself than to his mother.

Evan had never really had a friend. A real one, who genuinely liked him, no ulterior motives or false starts tainting their relationship.

This strange world had given him a chance to change that, and damn it all, he was going to try not to waste it.

  
  
  
  
  


“Connor! We’re back!” 

Connor rolled his eyes, rolling over on his bed to retrieve his headphones from his nightstand, preparing to drown out his family with music. An angry rock playlist, maybe, or some dumb soundtrack. 

He hadn’t added any tracks to his Evan playlist in a while, so he should probably look for more content there.

“Connor, are you awake?”

Cynthia was screeching an awful lot. Connor wondered briefly if something had gone wrong at the concert, before firmly reminding himself that he didn’t care. If they’d wanted him to care, they shouldn’t have blanket banned him from the event. 

Which, of course, they would say, ‘well, Connor shouldn’t have punched through the wall,’ but Connor could shoot back with the idea that maybe certain people should keep their opinions to themselves if they don’t have anything fucking nice to say. 

The reminder of the morning’s argument had him picking at the neckline of his hoodie, pulling it up over his nose and sniffing at the fabric.

Smoke clung to the threads in a deep embedded way that would probably never be truly washed out, but fabric softener and detergent from repeated washes overpowered it for the most part. 

Larry’s comment hadn’t even been meant as an attack, but listening to his family casually discuss the stench that followed him had made him hyper-aware of it. 

Evan hadn’t seemed to notice one way or the other, though, which was comforting. If he did stink, at least it didn’t bother him that much. 

Things had been simpler, before, Connor thought - it was easier to deal with Miguel, who made all the same bad choices he made and more, then to try and accommodate someone as virtuous as Evan Hansen. 

Evan, who panicked at the mere implication he would do drugs, but happily spent an hour recounting to Connor all of the interesting facts he’d learned about cannabis during a late night internet binge. Evan who listened to him stumble his way through an explanation of ‘this place didn’t  _ totally  _ suck’ before quietly observing that the trees were grouped in sections by type of apple and dragging him along to try and identify some individual ones. 

Evan who was always willing to go along with things, without making a big deal about it, or treating every display of rational thinking Connor showed like it was a rare gem to be hailed in a museum for all time. 

When Connor did something ‘ _ good’  _ around his family, they practically threw a party.

When Connor did something good around Evan, he would just get a small smile and maybe a ‘thanks,’ and it would go by like it was totally normal. 

‘Bad’ things were handled just like that, too. His parents would lecture him for days over one mistake, while Evan was quick to accept an apology and move on as though nothing happened. Probably because anytime  _ Evan  _ did something he didn’t like, he wouldn’t stop apologizing for it until he forgot he’d even done it in the first place. Someone like that probably understood that Connor was his own worst critic, sometimes. 

The bedroom door swung open, and Connor raised his eyes lazily to the form of his mother in the doorway. 

“Oh, you  _ are _ up,” she said, sounding almost happily surprised. 

“Hard not to be,” Connor couldn’t help smarting off in response. “You started yelling as soon as you got here.”

“Zoe’s keys were moved,” Cynthia said, apparently choosing to ignore him speaking completely.

_ Shocker. _

“Where did you go?”

“Out.”

Cynthia narrowed her eyes at him. “You were grounded. You were supposed to stay here.”

“And we both know I wasn’t gonna do that,” Connor countered. “So what’s the big deal?”

“Did you go somewhere to do drugs?”

Connor snorted. “Why bother? I can do those here.”

_ “Connor!” _

“What?” He shrugged. “I’m not saying anything new.” 

Cynthia shook her head. “I just don’t know how we got here, sometimes, Connor.”

Connor couldn’t really understand the confusion, there. He’d never been a good kid. He’d been impatient and ill-tempered since he was old enough to show any personality at all, and it only got worse the more hormones and chemicals he threw on top of it. 

“How was the...thing?” Connor asked, in a tone that made it clear he was asking more to change the subject then to sate any genuine curiosity. 

“...Decent,” Cynthia said. “Band camp over the summer has only gotten them the basics down, so they’re not quite as good as they usually are during the year, but they’ll get there.”

“Yeah,” Connor drawled. “Maybe the band director will even learn Zoe’s name this year.”

“Watch it, Connor.”

He raised his hands in surrender, watching his mother turn to leave, door standing wide open after she was gone. 

Before he could get up to close it, Zoe herself appeared, as though summoned. 

“Where’d you take my car?” she demanded. “If you smoked in it, I swear to God, Connor-...”

“You’ll what?” he couldn’t help but retort. “What are you gonna do, Zoe?”

They stared each other down for a long moment. 

“...Did you smoke in my car?”

_ “No,” _ Connor answered, somewhat indignantly. “I drove in it to get where I was going, and to get back. I didn’t smoke in it, I didn’t hide a dimebag of cocaine under the seat, I didn’t drive it into a tree. Christ. Like I’ve never used your goddamn car before.”

“You use my car?”

Connor raised his eyes to the ceiling, wondering how exactly he’d gotten so spectacularly fucked in his lottery draw for family.

“Where’d you go, anyway?” Zoe asked. “I heard you tell mom you didn’t go do drugs, but I mean... You don’t have any friends.”

“Thanks, sis,” Connor said, utterly dry. “I needed that. Really, I did.”

Zoe rolled her eyes at him. “You know what I mean, asshole. What do you do besides smoke pot and sleep?”

Draw, as often as he had the energy. Read. Try and teach himself to swear in foreign languages. Research nature facts so that he could feed tidbits into Evan’s special interest rambles as often as possible. 

Lots of things, just things no one cared to notice. 

“None of your business,” he offered, instead of any of those things.

The same answer he’d give until the end of time. One thing was for damn certain: Evan’s friendship was a gift he did not intend to share. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> connors pov is rough and short bc a lot of his stuff is. later in the story  
> so i didnt want to say too much for him right away  
> zoe and connor are also eventually going to be Good Siblings but right now. zoe resents connor because he was the center of attention her whole life and she was neglected because of it, and connor resents zoe because he doesnt understand why she, the Normal One™, thinks he is at fault for their parents wanting to believe he is irredeemable


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think this is about to become my official nanowrimo project because ive written way more of this than my actual nanowrimo story lmao  
> notes for this chapter: connor's writing voice from the emails is lifted directly from his narration style in his parts of the book, because his casual disdainful commentary on things is hilarious to me. tiny details about their friendship are hinted at or partly revealed, all to be expanded on later. connor does not tell evan some things, like him not mentioning his family commenting on his smell and making him self conscious enough to hardcore wash his clothes after smoking.   
> i think thats it for now so. enjoy, kiddos

Waking came slowly and with waves of full-body pain, which Evan supposed was unsurprising. He had been hit by a car, after all, and that was bound to have done significant damage. 

When he opened his eyes, though, it was not a hospital room that greeted him, but his own bedroom.

“Oh, no,” he breathed out, and scrambled out from beneath his blankets to free his arm.

A blank white cast greeted him.

You couldn’t sleep in dreams, as far as Evan knew, which meant that this was less likely to be his coma theory and more likely to be some sort of afterlife. 

Or, he thought, slightly hysterically, maybe it was real. Maybe the flash of Connor he’d seen before the car hit had been whatever mysterious power controlled the universe coming to offer him a ride into some other reality, where nothing he’d ever said about his ‘friendship’ had been a lie. 

Or maybe - and this seemed most likely - he’d finally snapped under the pressure and anxiety of his life and was trapped in some weird full time delusion. 

Regardless of what was going on, though, waiting it out was officially not an option. 

That did bring up an idea, though: if his lies were  _ all  _ true, and he and Connor were really the friends he’d claimed they were...that would mean Evan had all the information he needed at hand.

All he had to do was check his email.

He hopped out of bed, rushing over to his laptop, impatiently waiting as it booted up. With bated breath he watched his email load in.

Over to one side, there was something Evan had not seen before. Beneath the standard sorting categories of ‘spam’ and ‘read’ and ‘trash,’ there was an icon of a folder with a down arrow next to it. Clicking it expanded a list of what appeared to be custom folders - three of them. Each was labeled ‘college’ and a number. 

‘College1’ seemed to hold actual college information, like school brochures and invitations to open houses.

‘College2’, in contrast, was full of scholarship information.

‘College3’, when opened, had nothing to do with college at all. The title was a decoy, he supposed, because the actual content of the folder was nothing but emails back and forth with a single contact - “Connor.”

He’d found what he was after.

He selected the most recent email - one that claimed it had arrived the previous morning - desperate to read whatever he could to make this world a little easier to understand. 

 

_ Dear Evan Hansen, _

_ Lost my shit again. Long story short, I found a way to get out of Zoe’s stupid concert. I’m a free man. _

 

That explained why Connor had been so concerned about Evan not remembering that, then. He was supposed to already know.

 

_ Do you want to do something today? We haven’t hung out in a while. If you’re busy, it’s whatever, but I had a place in mind if you were willing to let me drag you out of the house for a couple hours.  _

_ Let me know, _

_ Me. _

 

Short and simple. Evan considered looking for his reply, but chose instead to return to his emails and look for the next oldest from Connor. 

This one was longer, and his full attention was immediately devoted to dissecting it for any information on his foreign friendship. 

 

_ Dear Evan Hansen,  _

_ First off, I almost sent this from the wrong fucking email address, so that’s the way today is going.  _

 

Evan winced. Even as just text on a screen, the words read sharp and angry.

 

_ This is going to sound like some prime spoiled rich kid bullshit, but I really wish they’d get the fuck over the car thing already. As far as they know, I crashed trying to keep from hitting an innocent animal, which should make them happy. I mean, not giving a fuck about animals is psychopath stage 1, right? Should be a point in my favor. But, no, nobody believes me, because no one ever does, so I’m banned from driving. _

_ And before you say anything, asshole, I don’t care if it actually  _ was _ a lie. They can’t prove anything and I’m not admitting to jack shit. _

_ The point here is basically that they’re planning to do some ‘family outing’ thing to a jazz band concert for Zoe, because apparently they don’t even wait for school to start before they start making people waste their weekends. If I had a car, no big deal. Offer to drive myself and then just..not go. _

_ Nope, not happening. We’re all gonna be in one car, which means I get to sit next to Miss Princess while she’s all wound up worrying about her show. Everyone there is just there for their kid, so nobody is gonna even give a shit what she’s doing except our parents, and fuck knows they’re not gonna pay enough attention to how well she does to know how proud they should pretend to be. Zoe before a show is like you in a car, except a car can kill you and the worst that will happen to her is that some middle aged soccer mom will post a shitty video of their concert on Facebook and it’ll get a comment like ‘man, that guitar sounds rough.’  _

 

Evan felt a smile pulling at his lips that he immediately felt bad for. Part of him wanted to reply to the email, defending Zoe and explaining that anxiety didn’t necessarily always make sense, even if he’d probably already answered it when he got it originally. Another part of him, which he felt even  _ worse  _ about, zeroed in on the comparison made and was touched by the implied defense of his worries. Connor talking about their anxieties had carried the feeling that he was defending Evan, implying that fears from him were somehow automatically more valid and defensible than ones from Zoe. 

Maybe he was reading too much into it, but...That really seemed like they  _ were  _ friends, and not just two loners venting to each other because they had no one else to talk to, like Evan had sort of been expecting. 

 

_ This gets worse, by the way,  _ the email continued.

_ Talking about the concert got them started on school, which got them started on the “oh, Connor, you’re a senior, you should be looking forward to this, you should get the ~full experience~” bullshit. Apparently they’ve got the paperwork for extracurriculars and shit already, and they were like, “hey, do you want to take any  _ extra  _ school shit, since you clearly just  _ love  _ the classes you have to take anyway.” So I look at the paper, just to say I did, and boom. First line. Art. I like art. School like kids that took art. Win-win, right? _

_ And then fucking Zoe throws out some shit like, “Oh, a club would cut into his smoking-behind-the-school time,” and everyone starts bitching at each other about being supportive if I wanted to do something and I take the time to just leave the room. Because that’s how Friday nights go in the Murphy household: Connor starts a fight, and then leaves before he has to participate in it.  _

_ So, yeah. Great night. Real fun. _

_ Anyways, /end vent, I’m glad you liked HGTTG. Your sense of humor is weird, so I wasn’t sure you would.  _

_ (That’s not an insult, by the way, so don’t freak out.) _

_ Don’t ask me for too many more recommendations, though, because you’re going to ruin my reputation by making me pull out the real nerd shit. Full Shakespeare collection kind of nerd. SparkNotes are for cowards.  _

_ Read Frankenstein, though, so someone else can appreciate how fucking Extra Victor Frankenstein was. Like, who builds a corpse boyfriend and then panics because it’s ugly? If you’re gonna be a monster fucker, you gotta commit.  _

_ Not really sure where I was going with that one, tbh. I may be slightly extremely high. _

_ I’m gonna drink energy drinks and hope that either my brain or my heart stops. There's no finger gun emoji on my laptop, so just picture one here. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Me. _

 

Evan was laughing until the end of the email, where the casual reference to death made his breath catch. 

Connor was  _ joking,  _ but Evan knew that genuine suicidal ideation was lurking behind the humor. As lighthearted and funny as the email (or at least the end of it) read, the boy behind it was going through real pain. The long vent showed Evan that Connor’s decision hadn’t been as impulsive as he thought. He’d been worried that it was his own actions, with Jared’s actions and even Zoe’s, that had made Connor give up. Now he could see that, if the real world and this one were aligned at all, it had simply been the final straw. 

A further issue with this was that Evan was still instinctively drawn to reply in defense of Zoe again, to argue that she had reasons to be bitter and didn’t realize the extent to which it bothered Connor. 

He needed to get over that, though. He’d had his chance to get close to Zoe, to know what it was like to be with her, and he’d destroyed it and then walked into traffic instead of dealing with it. As much as it pained him, he didn’t have time to be worried about her, here, except to the extent to which her relationship with Connor weighed them both down. 

Maybe...maybe if he could get them to talk to each other, to get along a little better, maybe he’d have the chance to go for it again. Maybe their last kiss wouldn’t  _ really  _ be their last for him, and maybe this version of Zoe would present him with a new first.

First kiss, that was, he quickly forced his mind to tack on, flushing a deep red and praying that he never,  _ ever  _ implied something like that out loud. 

Especially not near Connor, who got pissed at him in the first place because of his crush on Zoe. A Connor he was  _ friends _ with might have an even worse reaction.

Or maybe he already knew. Maybe this Evan was less of a bald-faced liar. 

Probably not, though. For someone who had made an effort to be honest for most of his life, lying had recently become an ingrained part of who he was. Even for little things, it was easier to reach for a story than to spit out the reality. At least if people hated him for his made up pieces, he had the comfort of knowing they didn’t hate the  _ real  _ him, only the version of it he’d created to present to them. 

Again, maybe he was overthinking. Maybe, in a world where Evan talked to Connor Murphy every day, his crush on Zoe had been stomped out by association. Everyone had thought it was weird that he’d started dating Zoe after Connor died, so maybe that  _ was  _ weird. Maybe Connor and Zoe fighting all the time meant that Evan had an established bias against her.

Or, maybe, his lies  _ there  _ were true, also. Maybe the Connor that was friends with Evan actually did like Zoe, and was just...really bad at showing it.

Evan looked over the email again.

Really,  _ really  _ bad at showing it.

That was an interesting thought, though: he really had no idea how his friendship with Connor affected how his life went. Hell, he didn’t even know when they’d become friends.

...But, maybe…

He returned to his email, flipping the sort-by-date function to pull up the oldest email first. Only so many months of emails would store there without being flagged, but he was lucky in that his past (alternate?) self had apparently deemed Connor’s first email worthy of keeping.

Either that, or it just hadn’t been that long ago, which seemed equally likely when he saw the date on it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple months prior, putting it right at the start of summer.

Curiosity burning, he clicked it, starting to read.

 

_ Dear Evan Hansen, _

_ This is my humble and pretentious apology letter, sent because you’re a fucking weird guy and gave me your email and not your phone number. Which, I mean, I get it. I wouldn’t give the big bad Connor Murphy my phone number either. Still, now you get to deal with this, instead of just a text. Sucks to be you. _

_ Unless you just delete it without reading it, in which case, rude. Know that I’m judging you from inside your trash bin. _

_ So yeah. This is me telling you that I am sorry I pretty much tripped over you while you were at work, and I appreciate you not calling someone to haul me off to a hospital or juvie or wherever they felt like throwing me.  _

_ Thanks, _

_ Connor _

 

Evan took note of the email’s date, and quickly searched it in his  _ sent  _ folder, trying to find his reply. 

Sure enough, it was the only result. 

 

_ Dear Connor Murphy,  _

_ I’m really sorry I didn’t give you my phone number! I didn’t think you would actually want to talk to me, and even if you did, I’m terrible with phone calls. I don’t like giving my number out because people might actually call me and then I’d have to answer and I’m very, very bad at that. _

_ Also, don’t worry about it! I was glad I could help. Also, this is gonna sound kind of bad, but I was relieved to see someone else freaking out the same way I do. I mean, mine is more anxiety and yours looked like it was probably drugs, but still. _

_ What were you doing out there, anyway? Ellison Park has a bunch of park rangers employed, so it probably wasn’t a great place to hide out to do slightly illegal stuff. I mean, I don’t really know what they’d do, because I’m supposed to be an apprentice park ranger and they didn’t tell me what to do if I saw someone using drugs in the park, but it probably wasn’t meant to be talking to you until you came out of it enough to go home.  _

_ I’m glad you got home safe, by the way. I wasn’t sure you would, but I couldn’t leave to make sure and even if I did it wouldn’t have been any use because I can’t drive. _

_ Or, well, I  _ can _ drive, I just don’t. I heard you got in a car accident awhile back so you probably get it, but I’m terrified of cars. And I should probably stop telling you stuff about me, but I feel like I should even it out a little, because you told me a lot of stuff while you were high and I’m not sure how much you actually remember saying but I kind of feel like I know you pretty well now despite the fact that we’ve only really talked once.  _

_ Anyway, I’ll stop babbling. You don’t have to apologize, I liked talking to you! _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Me _

 

He’d probably signed it that way out of habit, too used to his letters to himself. He could almost see himself typing out the email, refusing to take a moment to revise what he typed out, because if he edited one word he’d edit the whole thing and it would never even get sent. Anxiety rang in the background of every word, and Evan stuck on the end, wondering what secrets Connor had shared with him. Were they secrets that Evan had learned in his time leeching off the Murphy family, or new things that he would have to (re)discover for himself?

He was surprised at how desperately he wanted to know.

Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d have the time to find out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jared: you sound like lovers  
> evan: no we dont shut up
> 
>  
> 
> later, upon reading his own emails  
> evan: oh god dammit


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the first part of this chapter was written to the sound of "she used to be mine" from waitress (specifically the sara bareilles demo) because thats pretty much inline with how i imagine heidi to be  
> heidi in the book is. a very complex character who is both amazing and very openly flawed and i tried to reflect that here  
> also i promise its not meant as heidi bashing. i love her she just Does Not Like Herself

See, the thing was, Heidi Hansen wasn’t really a good person.

She tried to be. She might have actually been one, once, but time had soured that, and now she was a bitter shell of the woman she used to be. Shards of her golden heart had been left scattered in the back of a U-Haul among the shatters of the picture perfect family life she’d tried so hard to hold onto for so long, before she finally let go and was left fumbling for a grip to keep her steady.

That grip had landed on Evan, and that pressure at some point had cracked him and she hadn’t even noticed. Evan’s mind had been battling just to support its own weight and there she was piling more on him, making him responsible for holding the broken pieces of her heart together.

Somewhere along the way, keeping good things in her life got to be like trying to carry water in a paper bag. Not only did it not work, she got a hell of a mess for even trying.

So, no, she couldn’t consider herself a good person, because if she had the choice between helping herself and helping someone else there was no longer and part of her that could rationalize the latter. Her rationale in every situation tended to default to something like  _ if I don’t help myself, no one will.  _ She’d hold onto what she had until her nails left gouges on its surface, and the only two things that were still hers to claim were her love for her son and her damnable pride. 

That pride would be the end of her, she knew, but it was a part of her she could never quite shake. It was that pride that carried her across the country to attend Mark’s wedding to his cute little cocktail waitress wife, trying to prove she was above the jealousy and bitterness that had eaten at her the whole time they were in Colorado and still poisoned her every time his name or face or memory came up. It was pride that kept her in class at night, rather than giving in and doing the cool modern thing of taking her courses online, as though the physical act of showing up in a classroom would somehow affirm to the world that she was  _ trying.  _ She was  _ trying  _ to be better, she was  _ trying  _ to do more, she was  _ trying  _ to be a mom that could provide the kind of life for her son that Evan deserved, that Evan should have had, and if she had been a little less selfish and a little less proud and a little less-...

...But that was all just hypothetical. It could be that nothing she could have done would have changed the way things played out, and that the cards she was dealt had nothing to do with the endgame. 

The point was, she had acknowledged at some point along the way that it no longer really mattered to her if she could consider herself a good person. In fact, she was relatively confident she wasn’t one. 

Good people didn’t listen to their son admit to having a friend and immediately feel nothing but confusion and a sickening  _ doubt  _ because it was somehow more plausible to her that he was making something up than that he had genuinely developed a social life without her noticing.

She’d even considered, however briefly, calling Leah Kleinman, because the woman had once referenced Jared having a habit of occasionally just making up wild stories out of nowhere. She hadn’t talked to Leah in a long while, though, because she always got the feeling that her and Evan were more of a pet project or charity case for the Kleinmans than actual  _ friends _ . Every time they’d volunteered to keep Evan while she worked or went to class, she’d had to force herself not to sabotage them both by saying  _ no, actually, I think I’ll miss tonight and watch him myself.  _

Again, pride. That damned pride. 

She thought about it all throughout work the next day, though, and Evan having secret meetings with some kid would actually explain a lot. Sometimes he claimed he’d eaten when no food was gone and the money was still laying on the counter, but she’d always assumed he was just lying. Sometimes he’d mention ‘oh, I saw that’ or ‘yeah, I went there’ when she knew for a fact that she hadn’t taken him to watch that movie or driven him to that particular park. And all of this was relatively recent stuff, too, so she’d just chalked it up to Evan feeling cagey because of all the therapy stuff and doing that thing where he replied to her automatically without actually thinking about what he was saying. 

The one thing that  _ didn’t  _ make sense, though, was that Evan wouldn’t  _ tell her.  _

That was what got her into her introspection in the first place: she couldn’t figure out which particular trait of her generally  _ not a good person  _ personality had been the one responsible for Evan deciding not to trust her with this for however long he’d been meeting this kid.

This  _ Connor  _ kid, who made Evan’s eyes dodge meeting hers even more aggressively than usual, who had him plucking stray threads out of the plaster-pasted cloth of his cast, who made Evan’s eyebrows twitch together into and a little smile cross his face like it was  _ just so funny  _ that someone wouldn’t want to be his friend publicly. 

There was something else going on, there. She was scared to try and guess what. She couldn’t picture Evan doing anything terribly sketchy, if only because the kid tended to have a black-and-white good-vs-bad kind of thinking with things, and was already pretty harsh to judge himself for things that didn’t even matter. She’d seen him have a full blown panic attack once because he’d forgotten to return the pen he’d filled out his forms with to the cup on the receptionist’s desk at the therapist’s office.

(He didn’t even take it out of the room, just left it on the table, but he’d stopped in the doorway and turned around and rushed back to put it up and put it back in the cup because that was just how he  _ was,  _ he had to do everything in his power to make himself less of an inconvenience, because that was all he ever saw himself as.) 

If Evan wasn’t doing something crazy, though, she was at a loss for what he  _ was  _ hiding. 

...Unless..?

She tried to think of a time Evan had ever shown interest in anyone at all, gender aside. She’d never really thought about him  _ dating,  _ considering how much of a battle it was to just get him to tell the cashier at the gas station whether he was paying with cash or a card. 

Going from ‘Evan literally never talks to anyone’ to ‘Evan might have a secret boyfriend’ in one day was a little bit of a jump, but she wasn’t really sure where else she was supposed to take the confession. 

...If it was true, though. Well, she’d need to be certain to impress upon Evan a few hard truths about just how much faith you could have in a man.

Or maybe that was her, being petty and bitter, just like always.

Just her giving in to that goddamn pride.

  
  
  
  


Anxiety and waiting didn’t really mix well.

Any idle time Evan ever had was inevitably spent worrying about something, turning over worst case scenarios in his mind until he’d done more damage with the worrying than whatever bad thing that actually ended up happening would do. 

Which, to be fair, that had gotten a lot less true lately, because Evan had developed a wonderful habit of getting himself into situations that could  _ massively  _ fuck up his life, and then just making them that much worse by being the general disaster he was. 

Waiting for school to start, then, was a shitty concept, but he didn’t really have a whole lot of options. He needed to talk to Connor, preferably regularly and over an extended period of time, and his only avenue to do that right now was an email address he wasn’t even totally certain Connor checked. It could be that they had a strictly reply-only thing going on, where Connor only ever read what Evan had to say when it was said in response to an email the other teen had sent out. The value of Evan’s input could have been directly parallel to how much it helped Connor answer an explicitly stated question. 

Or maybe he had it backwards, and Connor had sent the last email, so it was Evan’s turn to reply, and he hadn’t, and now Connor was waiting on him to say something, but he  _ couldn’t  _ because he didn’t know what to say because  _ they weren’t actually friends.  _

So, yeah. Waiting. Waiting for an email, waiting for school, waiting for the world around him to do something he could react to instead of having to take any initiative of his own. 

Luckily, being a coward did not seem to be a shared trait in their friendship, because it was only around lunchtime the day after the fall when Evan’s obsessive studying of the emails was interrupted by the arrival of a new one. 

 

_ Dear Evan Hansen, _

_ I’m sorry about your arm. I’m probably gonna keep apologizing for that until I’m dead. _

 

Evan winced at the wording.

 

_ Seriously, climbing that tree was a class A dumb move and I shouldn’t have told you to follow me up.  _

_ I hope you’re doing okay. I really hope that amnesia shit was temporary and that it’s gone away by now, because that scared the hell out of me.  _

_ Email me back so I know you didn’t die or something.  _

_ Sincerely,  _

_ Me _

_ P.S. Don’t get addicted to your pain meds. Rehab fucking sucks.  _

 

Sound advice, really.

Moving to act before he could talk himself out of it, Evan hit the  _ reply  _ button, trying to type out a response faster than his brain could question his word choices.

 

_ Dear Connor Murphy, _

_ I’m okay! My arm doesn’t hurt that bad and my head doesn’t hurt at all. I mean, I’m still confused about some stuff, but my memory isn’t really great anyway, so I’m probably fine. No need to apologize. I wanted to climb that tree, too. _

_ Honestly, though, I probably won’t take my pain medication very much. Taking an opioid is a scary concept and I would rather just take regular tylenol and suffer than risk it.  _

 

Evan hesitated, an idea for the next line tentatively presenting itself to him, and he pressed on, refusing to second guess it. 

 

_ Unrelated, I spent the morning reading some of our old emails, remembering some of the stuff we talked about. I just wanted to say...I’m really glad we’re friends, Connor. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Me  _

 

He hit  _ send,  _ and had just enough time for the computer to load the prompt before he started to panic. 

  
  
  
  


Connor was going to  _ lose his shit.  _

What the  _ fuck  _ did that mean? “I’m really glad we’re friends”?

How hard had Evan hit his head? Was he going to die and just trying to make sure Connor didn’t feel bad went he bit it? 

Did he catch on, at some point during Connor’s flailing about in the post-tree chaos, to the major stupid puppy crush he’d had on Evan for months, and chosen to take the easiest route to gently tell him to cut that shit out?

Anything was possible, really. At least, anything seemed more probable than that Evan had meant exactly what he wrote, nothing more and nothing less, continuing to show that pure and wholesome energy that  _ radiated _ from the kid. 

Still...regardless of what it meant, he’d sent an email, and that meant the protocol was clear.

Taking a deep breath, and sucking it up, Connor hit the button to reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> connor: idk how to say !!!! out loud but thats the Mood™


End file.
